"Meeting Freddie Highmore for the first time was kind of an adrenaline blur—I was so star struck," she says of her Bates Motel costar. "I grew up watching him in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Finding Neverland, Spiderwick Chronicles, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. It was just so surreal."

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"I'm going to sound like such a girl when I say this, but I love Titanic. It's one of my favorite movies. I shouldn't confess things like that, but I do," Olivia says.

Meet Olivia Cooke, the Scary-Good Actress Set to Take Hollywood by Storm

You're about to see this new scream queen everywhere.

The box office often finds its brightest new stars in scary places. (So often, in fact, that we devoted our entire 2013 Young Hollywood portfolio to the horror genre.) Following in the footsteps of scream queens like Rooney Mara and Elizabeth Olsen is Olivia Cooke, a 20-year-old Brit who, over the past two years, has landed gaspworthy parts on screens big and small.

Olivia—whose early screen credits include the One Direction video "Autumn Term," in which she takes a piggyback ride on Harry Styles!—admits she was "unheard of" when, at 18, she was cast opposite Hunger Games hunk Sam Claflin in The Quiet Ones, a psychological thriller out this April. "I'd seen Sam on British TV, so I was a big fan," she remembers. "But I was too nervous to speak to him on set!"

She must have worked up her nerve, because Olivia went on to audition for Bates Motel, A&E's present-day prequel to Psycho starring Vera Farmiga, Freddie Highmore, and a bevy of up-and-comers. Despite submitting a "horrible" audition tape ("My American accent was terrible," she says, laughing), Olivia scored the part of Emma Decody, a cystic fibrosis–stricken teen who befriends a young Norman Bates. Her performance as the quirky, endearing outsider is a welcome breath of fresh air amid the show's heavier scenes. "Freddie is wonderful; we're really good buddies," she says of her costar (and on-screen crush). "Vera is a role model. I never went to drama school, so watching her is mesmerizing."

While her suspenseful new sci-fi flick, The Signal (costarring newcomer Brenton Thwaites), premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Olivia's biggest role to date is still to come: As the lead in Ouija (a freaky movie based on the board game used for contacting spirits), she'll appear in practically every scene. "Which is horrible," she adds with a laugh. "People don't want to see that!"

As she describes her humble "run-down" hometown of Oldham, Greater Manchester, Olivia's meteoric success comes as even more of a shock. But perfecting her craft in an after-school theater workshop there—far from Tinseltown's glitz—gave her a practical outlook that's proving useful now that she's working on the other side of the pond. "I never thought this would ever happen," Olivia says. "People always said to have a plan B, but acting is what I'm good at. Why do something that's secondary to me?"

To see Olivia in our April issue, pick it up on newsstands now. And to have Teen Vogue delivered every month, subscribe here!